The most politicized pontiff in contemporary history is in Washington D.C. this week. Then, the LAUSD campaign, Now Matters Later, provides tips on how to dissuade teens from engaging in the common practice. Also, while most of us are just finding out about VW’s deceit, one man and his research team began noticing discrepancies more than two years ago.
Papal politics: How Pope Francis stirs the culture wars in D.C.
The most politicized pontiff in contemporary history is in Washington D.C. this week.
This morning, he was welcomed by a crowd of thousands along a parade route to the White House. President Barack Obama introduced Pope Francis who addressed an audience of 15,000 on topics ranging from religious liberty to pollution and immigration - all hot, divisive matters in the current political climate.
“As the son of an immigrant family, I’m happy to be a guest in this country which was largely built by such families,” said Francis.
Speaking to President Barack Obama he said, “I find it encouraging that you are proposing an initiative for reducing air pollution. Accepting the urgency, it seems clear to me also that climate change is a problem we can longer be left to a future generation (sic).”
Tomorrow, Pope Francis will address the U.S. Congress. AirTalk will preview his remarks and how politicos are spinning Francis’ remarks.
Guests:
Patti Miller, Senior Correspondent, "Religion Dispatches;" Author, "Good Catholics: The Battle over Abortion in the Catholic Church" (University of California, 2014)
Chad Pecknold, Associate Professor of Theology, The Catholic University of America; Author, "Christianity and Politics: A Brief Guide to the History" (Cascade, 2010)
How parents should talk to their teens about sexting
The Los Angeles Unified School District this week unveiled a campaign to educate middle and high schoolers on the harsh consequences of sexting--the exchange of sexually explicit photos of themselves via mobile devices.
The campaign, Now Matters Later, provides tips for parents and teachers on how to dissuade teens from engaging in the common practice. Sexting, research has shown, is prevalent among teens, who have little idea of its legal and lasting consequences.
If you are a parent, have you talked to your kids about the danger of sexting? How have you gone about having that conversation?
LAUSD Social Media Policy for Students
Guest:
Elizabeth Schroeder, EdD, MSW, international sex education expert and founder of Elizabeth Schroeder Consulting, which helps adults teach young people about sexuality.
RIP: Yogi Berra’s best malapropisms
Yogi Berra, the Hall of Fame catcher renowned as much for his lovable, linguistically dizzying "Yogi-isms" as his unmatched 10 World Series championships with the New York Yankees, has died at 90.
We remember our favorite Yogi-isms, like “The future ain’t what it used to be,” “It ain’t over till it’s over,” “When you come to a fork in the road, take it,” and “You can observe a lot just by watching.”
Perhaps the best, though, was his response when asked by his wife whether he wanted to be buried in his native St. Louis or in his adoptive hometown of Montclair, New Jersey. Yogi’s reply? “Why don’t you surprise me.”
Guest:
Ben Zimmer, language columnist for the Wall Street Journal and executive editor of Vocabulary.com
The team of engineers who outed Volkswagen did their research in LA
Daniel Carder isn’t a whistleblower.
You won’t hear his name mentioned in the same breath as Edward Snowden or Daniel Ellsberg. But make no mistake, the work Carder and his team did helped uncover one of the biggest scandals in the history of the automotive industry. Carder, however, says he never set out to make the discovery he did. As he tells it, he was just doing his job.
Shortly before the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency went public with its accusation that popular German automaker Volkswagen knowingly installed software allowing its 2.0 liter, four-cylinder turbo diesel engines to cheat on emissions testing, Carder, an engineering professor at West Virginia University, was at work in the school’s Center for Alternative Fuels, Engines and Emissions.
“I got a little heads up from our friends at the EPA and [California] Air Resources Board,” Carder told AirTalk’s Larry Mantle in an interview on KPCC on Wednesday. "To be honest with you, I was in the laboratory and the phone started ringing. It’s been kind of a whirlwind since then. I’m shocked at how big it’s become in terms of international news, but I had no reason to believe that it would come to this.”
That may be because Carder and his team didn’t just recently stumble upon the data they collected that ultimately revealed Volkswagen’s deception. In fact, the research that formed the basis for the EPA’s claim against VW was done right here in Los Angeles, back in the spring and early summer of 2013.
Carder says they were asked to conduct the research after some tests done in Europe showed that some vehicles might not be compliant under all operation. A clean air group called the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT) gave them $50,000 to take a closer look.
Carder’s team, which has been conducting this kind of research for the last 25 years, used a device called a portable emissions measurement system to record the data, which Carder says is essentially an interconnected system of five suitcase-sized devices that are loaded onto the vehicle and tied into its exhaust system. To ensure realistic results, they chose routes that were heavy on vehicle, highway, and urban activity, which included a trip from L.A. to Mt. Baldy and back as well as one to Seattle and back.
“We were working with colleagues from the Air Resources Board, and they were actually using their lab in El Monte to verify the compliance with certification limits that the vehicles had displayed when originally certified,” Carder says of their reasons for choosing the routes they did. “In addition…portions of the L.A. Freeway were used to derive the cycle that has become one of the standard test cycles for vehicle compliance and certification.”
Carder says when the initial results came back, he was so surprised that he thought maybe his team had made a mistake. But after checking and double-checking the numbers, he said it was clear that their findings were solid.
“We were fairly confident in what we were seeing, and then when the vehicle was delivered to our colleagues at the Air Resources Board, those emissions levels were far below what we were seeing, and suggesting compliance. We’ve been at this for some time, so off-cycle emissions aren’t something new to the world, and we reported what we saw.”
The data were published through the ICCT and the findings were even presented at an emissions workshop in San Diego. VW even contacted Carder and his team to verify the results of their research and ask a few questions about how they got there. He says the thought that VW might have intentionally gamed the system never crossed his mind, and even offered to do additional testing.
“We weren’t suspicious, we just presented what we saw. There was something causing the vehicle to act differently. We had no idea what that would be, and it wasn’t our job to look into what that might be. We just presented the data as we collected it.”
Carder says he doesn’t know whether VW only admitted to cheating the system when the EPA refused to certify their 2016 models, and he says that it’s not likely other manufacturers are trying to game the system too.
“You see the results of the study, and there was another manufacturer there that exhibited very good performance, and was at or below the certification level,” Carder said. “More importantly than that, you’ve got a lot of heavy duty counterparts that use the same kind of technologies, and those technologies are working very well and they’re very successful in reducing emissions.”
Carder doesn’t see himself as the catalyst for uncovering a major corporate scandal, and says that he and his team have done plenty of similar testing in the past, often leading to voluntary recalls.
“We have no stake in this, there’s no reason we want to see Volkswagen fail, so I didn’t even follow the story. It was a complete surprise to me on Friday when the news broke.”
Since the scandal broke last week, Volkswagen CEO Martin Winterkorn has stepped down and VW has said it will set aside over $7 billion in the third quarter of 2015 to cover the cost of correcting the problems.
Guests:
Daniel Carder, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and interim director of the Center for Alternative Fuels, Engines and Emissions at West Virginia University
Pizza Rat, Keyboard Cat, and Dancing Matt: What makes viral video tick, and why we click
In 2004, before YouTube existed, a teenager named Gary Brolsma posted a video to the Internet that would change his life forever.
At face value, the video is unremarkable. Brolsma is seen sitting at a desk, wearing headphones and lip-synching along to a catchy song by a Romanian band while dancing and fist-pumping. But something about this video made millions of people watch it over and over again.
The ‘Numa Numa’ video, as it’s now known, is just one of thousands that, for one reason or another, have caught on with the Internet and have been shared across many platforms. We swooned and giggled as Charlie bit his little brother’s finger, we laughed at David’s expense as he asked “Is this real life?” while still loopy on nitrous from a visit to the dentist, we admitted that being Rickroll’d was funny (the first few times), and we danced along to Psy’s smash hit “Gangnam Style.”
The most recent example of viral video’s power came on Monday, when a New York City-based comedian posted a video of a rat carrying an entire slice of pizza down a set of stairs at a Manhattan subway station. Within hours of the video’s posting, several major Internet publications had shared the video, #PizzaRat was the number one trending hashtag on Twitter, and someone had created a ‘NYC Pizza Rat’ parody Twitter account.
So, why did the Internet fall in love with pizza rat? Was it because the rat, in his dogged pursuit of reaching the bottom of the stairs with the pizza in tow, symbolizes all of our day-to-day struggles? Or is it just because it’s kind of funny to watch a rat try to haul a slice of pizza twice its size down some stairs?
What makes a viral video go viral? Why do some videos go viral but others don’t? Are there criteria for a video being viral?
Guests:
Jonah Berger, associate professor of marketing at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, and author of the book “Contagious: Why Things Catch On” (Simon & Schuster, 2013). He also co-authored a study titled “What Makes Online Content Go Viral?”
‘Morally required and morally forbidden:’ the killing of an American jihadist
It was this month, four years ago that the Obama administration ordered the fatal Predator drone strike on 40-year-old, Colorado State University alum, jihadist and American citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki.
In his gripping dissection of the decision, which he calls “simultaneously morally required and morally forbidden,” New York Times National security reporter Scott Shane reminds Americans of the debate over whether to deliberately kill an American citizen without a trial or court order and the precedent that it set.
Guest:
Scott Shane, National security reporter for The New York Times and author of “Objective Troy: A Terrorist, a President, and the Rise of the Drone”